


this is how the world ends

by fightingtheblankpage



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Dark, End of the World, Gen, Gore, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-28
Updated: 2012-11-28
Packaged: 2017-11-19 18:49:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightingtheblankpage/pseuds/fightingtheblankpage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apocalypse!au; Scott wakes up one day and the world has ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is how the world ends

Scott wakes up one day and the world has ended.

No, that’s not quite right.

Scott wakes up one day and it finally sinks in: the world has ended. It’s been ending for three years now, slowly but surely. Three years is how long it takes for people to exit the stage, and three years is how long it takes Scott to actually let them go.

He’s seen quite a few movies about apocalypse in his life. Stiles liked those, and Scott remembers how there was always somebody who fought for humanity’s survival, some tangible danger.

There was no way to fight the virus – and everybody called it just that, ‘the virus’; everybody knew what you’re talking about when you said it – and three years later, the world has ended.

***

Stiles is the first to go. Not the first in the world, not even the first in Beacon Hills, but the first in their tight little circle. With seven billions people dead, give or take, you learn to treat them like statistics and numbers, not actual human beings.

This is how Scott thinks about it: Stiles is real. Scott’s Mom is real. And Allison’s real, Derek is, and Isaac, and Erica, and Boyd, Jackson and Lydia, and the Sheriff, and maybe a few other people, too. Mr Jonson, who dies on the same day as Stiles? Not real. Not a person with a wife and two daughters, an avid cyclist, owner of a nicotine-yellow smile. Just a number, not even an obituary. They’ve stopped printing those some time ago. They’d have to put them in an actual book every day, there are so many of them, Stiles joked. Pretended to joke.

Derek pretended to smile, for Stiles’ benefit, and then, when Stiles dies, Derek steals a gun out of the Sheriff’s room.

It’s an interesting thing, that the werewolves are immune to the virus. Well, they don’t get sick, but they die because of it anyway. They find out about it much, much later. When it doesn’t matter anymore.

Erica finds Derek, brains and blood smeared across the wall in the old Hale house. And they’ve painted the walls not so long ago, too, is Scott’s first thought. And then he thinks what a twistedly _Stiles_ thing to say that would be, and then it all goes south from there.

So, Derek is the second one to go.

Scott feels bad about treating Derek’s death as a sort of an afterthought to Stiles dying, so it’s good that Boyd keeps them all clinical about it. He talks about how Peter will be their alpha now, by the right of seniority or just because none of them wants the job.

Peter should be their alpha, but Peter is the third one to go.

He doesn’t die, he just… _Goes_. Disappears one night, without a single word to any of them. They have no idea _how_ , because travelling is forbidden and the army makes sure people stay put. Scott thinks Lydia knew, but Lydia doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t talk a whole lot these days. Scott understands that. Conversations seem like too much trouble, forming words is exhausting in the silence that Scott came to associate with the virus.

That makes Scott the alpha, but nobody really cares. Scott gives just one order. They take Derek’s body to the Hale house, lay him on the floor, and then they burn the house down.

This time they make sure that nothing remains, just ash and the foundations. The Hales are history now, and history that will be soon forgotten.

Nobody cares. It’s another thing about the virus: the apathy.

Once, Scott finds Isaac in his room with a small, utterly useless letter opener that Scott’s Mom got from her cousin. Isaac is driving the blunt knife into his thigh, time and time again. When Scott walks in on him, Isaac shrugs and says, “Just‒ checking.”

He doesn’t stop, though, and Scott just stands there and watches him.

Scott’s Mom dies a month later. The letter opener goes missing from the house.

***

Lydia is the fifth one to go.

It’s somehow more terrible to watch _her_ decaying from the inside, rotting while still alive, than it was to watch Stiles or Scott’s Mom. Lydia was always so carefully beautiful, and now she’s just this. Meat, Scott supposes.

It’s hard not to look at people this way, when every day you watch them going bad like something you’ve left in the fridge for too long.

Scott doesn’t know who’s the sixth and who’s the seventh, because Allison and Chris die on the same night, and nobody bothers with doing autopsy anymore.

What Scott knows is, Jackson is the eighth one to go.

Isaac kills him.

***

Jackson goes rabid. No particular reason why – he just does, one day. It’s too much, all of it, and maybe one morning it just dawns on him. So he shifts and never shifts back, and adds some numbers to the count of the virus’ victims, but none to Scott’s private count.

They hunt him down, and Scott is grateful that he isn’t the one who gets to Jackson first. Isaac does – he finds Jackson in Lydia’s old room. After that, Isaac goes missing.

Scott doesn’t think ‘Isaac is the ninth one to go’, for some reason. He thinks Isaac will be back.

He’s right.

Three days later, Isaac comes back. Scott is lying in his bed, in his empty, haunted house, and he’s not sleeping. Not sleeping seems to be what he’s doing all the time. Not being awake, just keeping his eyes open and drifting through it all.

Isaac is paler than usual, and his eyes are darker. When he undresses quietly and lies down next to Scott, Scott says nothing.

Speaking seems like too much effort.

Isaac curls around him, tucks his head into the crook of Scott’s shoulder, splays his hands over Scott’s chest. His breath is warm and moist, just like decay is.

“I’ve killed him,” Isaac says, his fingers brushing against the waistband of Scott’s sweatpants. Scott thinks they shouldn’t go there, and he really wants to go there.

“Yes,” Scott says. He doesn’t move a muscle, just lets Isaac take whatever Isaac needs. His warmth, maybe. The sound of his heartbeat.

“Would you kill me if the same happened to me?” Isaac asks, and he’s so close his lips brush against Scott’s neck.

Something clenches inside Scott and it never lets go after that moment. He’s stuck forever with that thing inside him, that dull-edged thing that feels like Isaac has stuck the letter opener into his chest.

“I’d like you to be the one to kill me,” Isaac says. “And then you could add me to your list.”

Scott hasn’t told anybody about his counting, and he doesn’t know how Isaac knows.

Isaac’s hand strays down, and into Scott’s sweatpants. Isaac shifts around until he’s comfortable before he starts moving his hand, and Scott bites at the inside of his cheeks not to let a single sound slip out.

“I dug a lot of graves when I was still human,” Isaac says. “I don’t do it anymore, you know. But I’d dig one for you.”

***

The Sheriff refuses to die. He tells it Scott one day, in that blank way he’s got ever since Stiles died a year and a half ago.

“There is too much to do,” the Sheriff says. And then, “People need to know that something’s still right in the world. That someone’s still trying to control this madness.”

The Sheriff is the tenth one to go.

After that, nothing’s right anymore.

***

It takes two years, but people finally figure out that some of them don’t get sick. There aren’t so many people _left_ , but they are like animals pushed to their limits by how unfair all of this is.

And the fact that the werewolves don’t get sick is that one last shove, and suddenly they are being hunted for. They run, and Scott feels alive for the first time since that whole this has started. This, at least, is something they can control.

With the whole world  against you, there is only so much running you can do.

Erica is the eleventh to go, and Boyd is the twelfth.

Scott thought he’s used to seeing corpses by now – nobody bothers with burying them anymore – but he’s wrong. After looking at Erica and Boyd, their bodies ripped apart by vengeful hands of the survivors, he starts getting nightmares that never really go away.

This is the first time it occurs to him that he’s a different _species_ than the people who did this. He stops thinking about himself as a human, and neither does he think that about Isaac.

This is the day Scott fucks Isaac for the first time. It’s hurried and hard, in an abandoned hospital of all places, and afterwards Scott tells Isaac that if he sensed a human anywhere near, he’d kill them.

Isaac kisses him.

***

Scott wakes up one day and the world has ended.

There is just him and Isaac, curled together in a bed in a no-name town. Scott hears a racoon outside – the animals, just like werewolves, are immune to the virus, and Scott wonders if it means they’re animals, too. Everything is in its place: the sun, and the sky, and Isaac’s hand where it rests on his chest. It’s just that there are no humans anymore.

They should probably try and find the werewolves that survived.

So he stops counting in his head, and when Isaac and him go, it’s to leave this life, and the ghosts populating it, behind.

The world has ended, and now that Scott is ready to face this fact, he thinks he may be ready to start a new one, too.

_~fin~_


End file.
